Odds & ends

• In a 2023 article from The Guardian (which only recently came to my attention), author Emma Gannon offers some thoughts on building a childfree life full of joy and meaning and alternative milestones. 
• I can't remember where I found the blog/website "Life Done Differently," but it's written by a childfree woman in New Zealand who has been travelling around the country and living out of her van for the past few years!  She hadn't posted in a while, but a new entry popped up in my blog feed recently -- she's currently settled in Christchurch, and has some thoughts & advice on "A Year of Making Friends and Building Community" that I thought was very relevant to  CNBCers! Enjoy! 
• "Being an aunt is not the same, but it’s pretty darned good," says Sue Fagalde Lick on her "Childless by Marriage" blog. (I heartily agree!)   
• Y.L Wolfe, whose work (often about childlessness) I've been reading on Medium for a few years, now has a Substack, "On the Outside." Check it out!  
• Caroline Stafford, who runs a bakery called The Kitsch Hen in the U.K.,  wrote a guest post last summer for Emma Barnett's Substack ("Trying with Emma Barnett") about "Trying... to build a life without children." (Jody Day recently shared it via Substack Notes.)  
• I highlighted a special Instagram post from The Kitsch Hen on this blog back in 2020.  :)  
• Jody Day, on her Gateway Elderwomen Substack, examines "The 3am bag lady blues" -- the fear many women (and childless/single women in particular) have about growing old in poverty. 
• This brought to mind a post I wrote after seeing the movie "Blue Jasmine" -- which won Cate Blanchett an Oscar -- 11 years ago now!  -- "Bagging my fears."  
• Having lost my own job less than a year after writing this and spending 10 years in early retirement so far, I'm not *quite* so fearful of winding up a bag lady today as I was then. (So far, so good...!)  But the fears of growing old, alone and isolated, remain.